Water

Since we moved to this house we built in 1995, I have had a sort of obsession with draining the standing water. Finally last year, we bought a little red tractor with backhoe and front end loader, and got to work on it. Last year we dug a trench to take the water from the rain gutters to the pond that we built, and dug an overflow that carries it away to the river. It made a huge difference in the mosquito population this summer, and I'm really glad we did it, but wish we had bought that tractor years ago.

This summer I've been sick a lot of the time, but we have managed to dig across the front to collect the snow melt that makes such a longstanding mess in the wintertime. It still needs grading, but it will carry water. That was a big item on my "bucket list." I'm so looking forward to NOT having a pond in the front yard.

Coming to Cleveland to live in 1989 was a geographical shock for me, because I couldn't grasp the flatness of this little area just on the edge of the Great Plain. Seriously, on the East Side of Cleveland, it's hilly and stretches toward the eastern mountains. But you get on the Ohio Turnpike and drive twenty miles west and you won't see a hill for - I don't know how far, farther than I've been. And when it rains, the water just sits in puddles mostly, because the clay soil won't let it perk through and there's no downhill.

I always compare it with the terrain of the mountains of Grayson County, Virginia, where a part of my heart will always be. There was water everywhere, bubbling right out of the earth, clean and pure. And never standing still, or breeding mosquitoes. Water knew what to do there, tumble down the mountain over rocks, to settle in a rich bottom where it caught the silt that made the soil so deep in those bottomland fields.

When we built our house in the mountains we captured a spring that we piped over to a reservoir, then pumped up to the house for our water supply. We weren't lucky enough to have a spring up the hill behind the house, which would have enabled us to have gravity feed, depending on the pressure created as the water flowed downhill into the house.

Right beside the driveway coming up to the house was a little tiny spring that ran down and connected with the other stream from up the hill, that was the overflow from the house water supply. One fine summer day the boys and I (Tristan, Matthew, and Nathan) were playing in it, and decided to do some excavating. So we dug into the dirt crevice where the water was trickling from, all the way back until we found the rock with cracks the water flowed through. We cleaned out the dirt and made a stone basin. And then, I remembered we had a bit of a bag of concrete left over from something. So, we mixed it up in a bucket, and with our hands and kitchen spoons, we made a dam, and so, a little pond with a tiny waterfall. That was a good time! The boys were very young, maybe four, six, and eight, because Justin wasn't born yet.

I can only imagine the projects I might have done if I had had my Little Red Tractor back then! Oh, what digging I could have done! We did without so many material things, and I'm happy about the choices we made, but I sure wish we'd had a little (red, preferably) tractor.